Sunday, November 3, 2013

Grassroots Pressure Builds on
Nuclear Dependent States to Come Out from Under Their Nuclear Umbrella and Take
a Stand to Ban the Bomb

Steve Leeps, former Chair of
the Hiroshima Peace Foundation and organizer of Mayors for Peace, wrote a great
article on recent developments in Japan, where citizen pressure caused Japan
tosign on to a statement at the UN
General Assembly emphasizing the catastrophic consequences of nuclear war and stating
that nuclear weapons should not be used under “any circumstances”.This past summer in Geneva, Japan,
sheltering under the US promise to use nuclear weapons on its behalf in
retaliation for any attack it might suffer, refused to sign a similar statement
and caught tremendous disapproval from citizens active in the new International
Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons working to ban nuclear weapons, just as the
world has banned chemical and biological weapons.Steve posted his article to an expert group
of US campaigners against nuclear power http://www.hiroshimapeacemedia.jp/mediacenter/article.php?story=20131029144834760_en&query=leeper.

One campaigner asked: “Does Japan have any nuclear
weapons? I thought they did not.”

I replied as follows:

The short answer, is no, they
don’t have nuclear weapons, but they are part of a nuclear mafia that shelters
behind the US nuclear “umbrella” pledged to be used on their behalf should
their enemies fail to be “deterred”.Additionally, since every nuclear reactor has the capacity to manufacture
nuclear bomb material, Japan has all the technology it needs to swiftly
assemble nuclear bombs of its own, having enriched uranium to weapons grade, as
has Brazil and others, the very thing we are threatening to go to war over with
Iran.In other words, it’s OK for Japan,
but not for Iran because Japan is part of our alliance.Indeed we actually park a few hundred
nuclear weapons on the territory of our NATO allies, including Germany,
Netherlands, Turkey, Italy, and Belgium!!http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_sharing

And this despite our promise
in the Non-Proliferation Treaty as one of the five recognized nuclear weapons
states (UK, France, China, Russia) not to share nuclear weapons. The NPT is a
flawed Faustian bargain in which the five nuclear weapons states promised to
give up their nuclear weapons in return for a promise from all the other
countries in the world not to get them.To sweeten the pot, the non-nuclear weapons states were promised an
“inalienable right”, to “peaceful“nuclear power thus giving them the keys to
the bomb factory.Only India, Pakistan
and Israel refused to sign and they got their own nuclear arsenals.North Korea availed itself of its right and
then walked out of the treaty to build a bomb.This is the right Iran is lawfully asserting.

For
years, those of us battling nuclear power, and those of us working to ban the
bomb, have operated in separate spheres.This was the result of a deliberate policy by the US after the
horrendous revulsion at what occurred in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to make the
atom more acceptable to people.Hence,
President Eisenhower,
seeking to counter public revulsion at the normalization of nuclear war in US
military policy, was advised by the Defense Department’s Psychological Strategy
Board that “the atomic bomb will be accepted far more readily if at the same
time atomic energy is being used for constructive ends.” Thus his Atoms for
Peace speech at the UN in 1953, in which he promised that the US would devote
“its entire heart and mind to find the way by which the miraculous
inventiveness of man shall not be dedicated to his death, but consecrated to
his life” by spreading the peaceful benefits of atomic power across the
globe. The benefits of nuclear
power were aggressively marketed as miraculous technology that would power
vehicles, light cities, heal the sick.The US made agreements with 37 nations to build atomic reactors and
enticed reluctant Westinghouse and General Electric to do so by passing the
Price Anderson act limiting their liability at tax-payer expense.

The
fallout from the 1954 Bravo test of a hydrogen bomb contaminating 236 Marshall
Islanders and 23 Japanese fisherman aboard the Lucky Dragon and irradiating
tuna sold in Japan resulted in an eruption of rage against the atomic bombings
which were forbidden to be discussed after 1945 by a ban instituted by US
occupation authorities.For damage
control, the US NSC recommended that the US wage a “vigorous offensive on the
non-war uses of atomic energy,” offering to build Japan an experimental nuclear
reactor and recruiting a former Japanese war criminal, Shoriki Matsutaro, who
ran the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper and Nippon TV network to shill for nuclear
power by getting him released from prison without trial.

The Comprehensive Test Ban
Treaty Organization, does global monitoring for radiation releases, to make
sure no one is cheating on promises to stop full-blown underground tests (not
to be confused with sub-critical tests, 26 since the 1992 treaty was signed, where
the US blows up plutonium with chemicals at the Nevada Test site on Western
Shoshone land, claiming that since there’s no chain reactions they’re not
really tests!?).The CTBTO originally
reported some of the fallout from Fukushima but now all reports are going to
the industry-corrupted IAEA and the WHO and to governments.We need a FOIA to find out where the fallout
is going.See www.ctbto.org

This has been a long answer
to a short question about Japan’s nuclear status, but y’all know more about
nuclear power than anyone else in the US and it’s important that you know about
its evil twin, the nuclear bomb.The
Abolition 2000 Network, working for a treaty to eliminate nuclear weapons
recognized the “inextricable link” between nuclear weapons and nuclear power in
1995 when we were founded.See www.abolition2000.orgThe
ICAN campaign that Steve Leeps referred to is a new and exciting development to
get a simple treaty saying that possession, use, manufacture of nuclear weapons
is illegal and should be banned, just as we have banned chemical and biological
weapons.A legal ban treaty would have
the advantage of not needing the recalcitrant nuclear weapons states to
negotiate it.Those negotiations would
come afterwards for a treaty to actually eliminate them.In the meantime, we are shaming non-nuclear
weapons states to take a less hypocritical honest position, and to stop hiding
behind the nuclear umbrella. Since the fall UN meeting, questions have been
raised in Germany and Italy as well, nations which actually house and shelter
US nuclear bombs on their territory as part of NATO’s unlawful nuclear sharing
program.See www.icanw.org